A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing mes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systemes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
The design of an object refers to the process of creating a shape of this object in three-dimension before creating a mock-up of the object. For instance, when a new car is thought, one of the important tasks is to create the body of the car. In general, the creation of a new object and its shape starts with a paper phase in which the designer of the object draws the object. The drawing comprises two steps. The first step is a sketch step wherein a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work is created. The second step is a tracer step wherein a definitive drawing of the object is designed from the sketch.
The sketch step is generally performed on paper, and the tracer step is then performed with dedicated software. The software Freestyle Sketch Tracer (Trademark) provided by Dassault Systemes allows the integration of stylists' work (such as 2D painting made at the sketch step) into a 3D format, as the basis for 3D virtual mockup. This product provides an intuitive toolbox for helping the designer to convert 2D data into 3D data: the designer first positions and scales a 2D image in 3D space, then draw the geometry over the sketches. In practice, the designer uses at least a 2D front view and a 2D side view of the object placed in the 3D space, and switch from the front view to the side view (and inversely) for placing points in the 3D space. Then, curves and surfaces are computed from the points until solids can be deduced.
This method for designing a three-dimensional modeled object however suffers several drawbacks. Firstly, the sketch and tracer steps are not integrated inasmuch as the sketch is still performed on paper and requires importing the drawings in the software. Secondly, the imported drawings are only 2D drawings, and therefore the geometrical curves are inferred from the imported 2D drawings. Thirdly, the creation of the 3D modeled object requires heavy computing resources because several computations are requires for computing the geometrical curves.
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved method for designing a geometrical three-dimensional modeled object.